Comments by "EebstertheGreat" (@EebstertheGreat) on "The Onion" channel.

Tavern remote?
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@koolaid33 The video is about a predictable and normal state of affairs that has persisted without interruption since before the country was founded. And the whole point of the video is that that's not about to change. So yes, 8 years later, it remains relevant.
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@neon-kitty It wasn't a hoax at all. It was just people taking a lame joke from a joke channel seriously. It's no different from people who take Onion headlines seriously.
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@Error-z8g Ben Collins? Impossible. Global Tetrahedron is run by Bryce Tetraeder. Only he could afford to buy the single greatest project of mankind, with over a trillion subscribers.
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@titus3264 There are some weird "sovereign citizen" types that really do believe that you can get out of an arrest, jail, a trial, or whatever just by saying the right magic words. It's the same level of insight revealed in the question, "are you a cop? You have to tell me if you're a cop."
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@Thebolfster But it didn't go down during the Gay Games. I think what actually happened is that some people in the building had poor service due to the concentration of phones there trying to access the internet, so it was really the network that was bad, not Grindr specifically. The maps people posted show outages in around 2 dozen metro areas including Milwaukee, but these are just reports, so we don't know if the people reporting the problem were having problems with Grindr or with the internet in general. And anyway, the fact that there were over 20 other big cities with reported problems flies in the face of the idea that the RNC was the cause.
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There is an old math joke that every natural number is interesting. Proof: Suppose there is an uninteresting number. Then since the natural numbers are well-founded, there is a smallest uninteresting number n. Being the smallest is an interesting property, which contradicts n being uninteresting. Therefore there are no uninteresting numbers.
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Whenever people tell you that JFK was killed by the CIA or the Oklahoma City bombing or 9/11 were false flags or the Apollo missions were faked or whatever, they always tell you a torrent of utter falsehoods that are so easy to check it makes you question your own sanity. Why would your friend spout such obvious nonsense? Why would someone confidently tell you what the law says when it takes three seconds to read what it says? It's the exact feeling I get when watching this video.
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It's probably state money, too. That's a whopping $0.000,000,5 for every man, woman, and child in Michigan. How can we afford that in this economy?
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@azlanadil3646 The RNC is like 50k people. It just can't possibly have that much of an impact on an app with 13 million monthly users. The actual Super Bowl probably has a much bigger effect on their traffic.
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The "swing county" was already pretty good. XKCD 2136 pretty much nailed it.
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@isaiah9666 Those are famous misconceptions that you could easily verify for yourself by looking it up. Why are you so confident that you won't even check? For what it's worth, many European explorers had already been to India by heading east. It was 6,000 km west of Japan. There is no scenario where he could have thought he had landed there. Rather, he thought he landed on islands east of East Asia. And you say "nothing was overestimated or underestimated" but then acknowledge in the very next sentence that "it is true they thought the west of Europe was a lot closer to the east of ... Asia." So in other words, he . . . underestimated the distance. And why did he do that? Because he thought the Earth was smaller in circumference and Eurasia was larger, exactly like I said.
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@anivicuno9473 That's not what unemployment means. A baby is not "unemployed." A student is not "unemployed." An elderly person is not "unemployed." Sure, they aren't employed, but they don't represent a problem in the economy. We certainly don't want a world where every human of every age and ability is forced to work full time. The unemployment rate is the fraction of people who want to work who don't because they haven't yet found a job. So it's the number of people who are employed divided by that number plus the number of people seeking a job. That's always been what it meant, and you not understanding that doesn't constitute an "undercount" or an "expressed intention of making it seem like there was less unemployment." When the rate is high, that shows it is difficult to get a new job. When the rate is low, that means it's easier. Right now, the rate is low. That's obviously a good thing.
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@Tom_H_86 The joke was that people ask ridiculous questions confidently like this and talk about how it makes them "ask questions." But if they actually asked those questions, they would know the answer, because the ideas are so ridiculous. I've never literally had someone tell me bullseyes were painted on the towers, but like most Onion content, it's just an exaggeration of a real phenomenon. You'll get people asking stuff like "if they didn't know the towers were going to be attacked, why did they suddenly purchase a new billion dollar insurance policy?" Like . . . what are you talking about? They obviously didn't. That kind of thing.
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When I was about 14, I saw a clip from that fight in some youtube video called "the worst sci fi fight of all time" or something like that. I didn't see the full episode Arena until maybe 5 years later, and I was shocked at how good it is. That short segment of fighting is wooden by any standard (and perplexingly so to modern viewers), but the fight as a whole isn't so bad, and the episode is really fun. It's cheesy of course, like the whole series, but if you go in expecting shlock you will be very surprised.
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@christiangamingchannel6284 For what it's worth, federal law simply overrides state law. Period. There is no required agreement by a majority of states, let alone an overwhelming majority. There are limits on what Congress can do, but when it does pass a bill that is within its purview, that always trumps all state law, automatically. Of course, you do need a majority of senators to pass a bill in most cases, so in that sense you sort of need support from a majority of states (but not an overwhelming majority).
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I think they were specifically referring to Trump even then, but now it seems like DeSantis might have him beat in the meaty face department.
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Incredibly, Biden is now winning among elderly voters.
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It didn't used to be the case that 2013 was different from before, but time changed back in time to make times change, and now 2013 is.
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@gacomics5951 I remember watching a TEDx from a woman who had surgically inserted tiny permanent magnets connected to electrodes into her own fingertips that would produce a sensation whenever her hands were near magnetic fields. She said she had one in every finger. She said that it was illegal to put these into someone else, but there was no law against doing it to yourself. She said she achieved it through blinding pain by the use of alcohol, willpower, and unspecified drugs. The implants worked, though. She could reliably and effortlessly detect magnetic fields with her fingertips. Well, most of them worked--sometimes they would do nothing, and she would dig them out later. Also, sometimes her fingers got infected. She still recommended it though lol. Totally batshit insane, but still cool to watch. That's something you'll never get out of a proper TED talk.
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We're not at 600 yet, but we'll get there. So far there have been 10 in the main sequence with an eleventh on the way, one spin-off with another on the way, and at least two more movies in the works. It's gonna surpass Star Trek.
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@bonnome2 The ground state of dioxygen is a triplet state, but it's still a double bond.
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@LazarheaD The Dwight Richmond segments have been pretty damn good.
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I can't wait to stop by at Salami. I needed a place to go between my trips to Needham and Hurlingham.
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@765infinity And don't forget that every new "shocking" poll they talk about has a ±3% margin of error. So 95% of such polls will give a figure within 3% of the true one in either direction. So if the truth is that the election is a dead heat in some state, 5% of new polls will show one candidate or the other ahead by more than six points (because nearly every vote one candidate loses the other gains). For instance, the poll could show 52-46 or 46-52 when really it's 49-49 and it still wouldn't be in the 5% of most extreme polls. Assuming every poll has perfect methodology. So guess what happens when the media cherry-picks the juiciest ones?
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@youtubedj9298 They did. Earlier this year on Twitter, Jeff Lawson asked for donations. He said, "If you care about The Onion, if the Onion ever made you laugh – give us a buck. For that dollar, you get… absolutely nothing. Just a smug sense that you’ve once again spent less on The Onion than its worth in your life. "A lot of people have asked, what do I get for $2? Twice as much nothing." They are also selling print subscriptions again, unbelievably. And it's successful so far.
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@whatteamwildcats4033 Not really. Columbus was trying to reach what he expected to be uncharted islands east of Japan. He underestimated the circumference of the Earth and overestimated the width of Eurasia, so Japan was much further from Spain than maps at the time showed. Columbus did not speak English, so he didn't call the inhabitants "Indians," but that term was used because America and its islands were called the "West Indies" by analogy with the East Indies. Nobody thought these were the same as the subcontinent of India.
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@andrewpinedo1883 The intrinsic advantages of SI are that it's coherent and uses decimal prefixes. But the real advantage isn't intrinsic at all. It's just that it's the system everyone uses. You could use whatever system you wanted, but if the whole world uses the same system, there is obviously an advantage to using that one. I mean, it is also nice that I can convert between kilometers and meters or whatever, whereas converting between miles and feet are hard. I definitely prefer decimal currency to the old pounds-shillings-pence system for the same reason. But that's not really a big deal. The big deal is just consistency with other countries.
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@D_YellowMadness Gmail was a rounding error. Traffic slowed because people searched for something in their default search engine, saw an error, and figured they didn't have service. Most people only check their email 1-10 times a day, so it is practically invisible compared to the usual avalanche of queries Google handles. Anyway, that particular outage in fact lasted only five minutes, and Google was much smaller then. So we're maybe talking about $100k in lost net profit, something like that. There were also lesser outages in 2014, 2018, 2020, 2020, 2020, 2022, and 2022. Even Google can't just never go down. It's not a god.
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If you can skip the bachelor party, the wedding would probably be great. You get to watch a shitshow unfold while getting drunk and eating sandwiches and cake. And I kind of want to hear that band.
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People who say The Onion were prescient cannot explain why they chose to produce this video that so obviously wouldn't fly anymore.
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Google's power is so extraordinary that now if this happened, Google would lose 10 million dollars. Don't think Google makes $5 million in revenue each hour? Psyche, they make seven times that much.
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Something similar to this really can happen in a few situations. For instance, if there is a run on banks, people can make virtual transactions but not actually have access to physical currency. In that case, they might pay a large premium for cash. (Note that even cash from an ATM usually costs more than one dollar per dollar.) Alternatively, in China, the official foreign exchange rates for the renminbi (CNY) are loosely set by the government (they can't differ from the reference rate by more than 2%), and there are other trading restrictions. But in Hong Kong (and the rest of the world), renminbi are traded for other currencies freely under the unofficial ticker CNH. So if the market rate for yuans is much less than the reference rate, people will be unable to sell their depreciating yuans to mainland China at face value and be forced to sell them for cheap in foreign markets, which could lead to a situation where one yuan (CNY) is worth many yuans (CNH). These aren't different currencies, just different markets trading the same currency, so it would literally be a "$90 a dollar" type of situation. Even more extreme divergences happen in countries undergoing hyperinflation, where official exchange rates are often vastly out of step with the street rate. At one point, the Zimbabwe dollar was trading for thousands of times as much officially as on the black market.
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